Added a new Vendor to Thorium Point. This vendor sells many of the same items as Darkbargainer in Blackrock Depths, as well as sells to players who have defeated “The Molten Core” a new Bind on Account consumable that increases your Fire Resistance by 150 while inside Molten Core, purchasable with Embers.
The Blackwing Lair “Three Affixes & Affix of the Week” Cache now contains a epic ground drake mount that corresponds to the color of the Affix of the week. For instance, if the Affix of the week is Blue, the Cache will contain a 100% speed ground blue drake mount. There are five drake colors to collect.
I think the first change would do a lot to boost engagement with HL3 in MC by allowing players to go back with their more powerful gear and still meet the Fire Resistance requirements, and the second change would draw mount collectors to BWL which would address some of the lopsided class population plaguing the dungeon. I also think the “gotta collect em all” color rotation would generate hype as players look forward to certain weeks for specific colors that they want (Black mount in theory having a higher level of prestige because it means it came from a Black week etc). I also think the reward being a mount would reduce the desire to simply do “Zug Runs” which I consider less fun than running with 20-25 players, as players who want the mount and don’t HR it would want to reduce the number of players they’re rolling against.
Would love to see these changes (especially the retroactive fire resist) make the older raids relevant again, perhaps even bringing back weapon appearance tokens that can be used on [any] weapons, it would be fun to see people walking around SW/Org with molten/bloodied/shadowflame weapons again. They also have a masterclass of how to keep a raid relevant with ZG (Though the rep grind is not the part to emulate). In all honesty- even for all it’s faults, I really liked the ST cosmetic items as well, I wouldn’t mind seeing some goofier drops make their way into tables (Let me turn into the molten core for 5 minutes to play the game on marble blast mode)
If they decide to add things effecting the power balance of the game I could also see a shoulder enchant giving you the retroactive Fire/Frost/Nature resistance provided by T1-2 sets or even adding the Timeworn tag to all non-tier raid items as a way to make the AQ system a more intuitive part of the gearing process.
ZG is absolutely the pinnacle of keeping a raid relevant, with a healthy and mostly happy population of raiders of many classes and dispositions. It’s also the raid I see played “as intended” the most often.
I personally feel these “zug runs” of BWL ruin the spirit of the raid and mostly feel bad. BWL has a sort of “race to the bottom” aspect where nobody runs the raid except for certain items, so those items get HR’d, the player quality for the raid gets worse because good players don’t want to do a run with the items they need HR’d, and because the player quality is worse, you bring more people to offset, which means even worse players are coming because only some of the worst players want to roll against 40 other players.
Having mounts or other cosmetic rewards (transmog would be huge for BWL I think, although transmog might be out-of-scope for SoD at this time) would bring back normalcy to one of the most fun raids. It’s such a shame to see BWL as fallen as it is this phase because of the way the itemization is. This is a completely solvable issue by Blizzard but they just… haven’t yet.
Time will tell if they do anything if they just “wait SoD out” in this respect.
I think providing cosmetic incentive to older content is by far the lowest effort and highest yield way for them to create more longevity in the content especially if SoD is going even further on the backburner after P7. It also neatly solves a problem without creating an arms race of there being a new bis variable/worrying about unbalancing things. Seeing AQ10 stay relevant just off the strength of profession recipes and a guaranteed (admittedly mid) mount really ought to serve as an eye opener for what the players view as repeatable content.
I would say ‘no’ to this. Head over to Cata and get yourself one of the drakes that uses the OG model. Now just ride around (on the ground) with it. It’s…in the way.
I’m not sure what ‘raid themed’ mount would be a good substitute. But I do know the drake mounts were problematic even for their riders in TBC(OG and Classic).
…what about if the place dropped BoE components that could be used by Engineers to make the motorcycles? I mean, the place does have Gobin engineers running around. - Though, I don’t think these mounts could be ‘multi-user’ ones; that code isn’t in this version.
